Step up for Prizes in GW Steps Challenge

Two-week fitness challenge offers Apple Watch, lunch and bragging rights to individuals and teams in GW community who log the most steps.

October 10, 2016

George Washington University students, faculty and staff will again face off from Oct. 17 to 30 in a steps challenge, a fitness competition to promote healthy living and wellness.

This is the second year the university has hosted the competition. Participants are encouraged to get in as many steps as possible each day, as tracked by a fitness tracker, iPhone or Android and logged on Stridekick, which has a GW-only site for the competition.

To participate, students, faculty and staff join their respective university division or school team. Instructions for signing up, connecting a tracking device, joining a team, logging steps (by syncing the tracking device each day with the Stridekick account) and tracking individual and team progress are available here.

After the two-week challenge ends Oct. 30, the team with the highest cumulative step average will win a free Beefsteak lunch.

New this year, however, is the opportunity to “chase” George Washington President Steven Knapp.

Each day of the challenge, individual participants should try to get a higher step count than Dr. Knapp. For each day a participant does so, he or she will receive one entry into a raffle to win an Apple Watch. Each participant can earn up to 14 entries into the raffle.

Participants should register by 11:59 p.m. Oct. 16. However, those who join mid-competition can still count any steps logged during the competition period, as long as they have been capturing the steps on a compatible tracking device and sync them to Stridekick.

Last year, the university community logged 146,017,582 steps during the challenge, which ran for four weeks.

The College of Professional Studies/Graduate School of Political Management won the team challenge, averaging 14,660 steps a day as a group.

The first-place individual winner, Jonathan Vadnal, a research assistant in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Hawdon Laboratory, averaged 41,279 steps per day over the course of the challenge.

So get stepping and use the hashtag #StepItUpGW to encourage some healthy competition.